Z-O-M-B-I-E-S (Paul Hoen, 2018)

As a lover of genrification, I found this Disney Channel original movie irresistible. Given the target demographic, it's High School Musical with zombies rather than Night of the Living Dead with musical numbers. Still, I'd love to slot it in a double feature with something truly foul like City of the Living Dead (Lucio Fulci, 1980) or, even better, Joe Dante's superb Masters of Horror entry "Homecoming" (2005) to demonstrate the commodiousness of genre. And guess what I'm watching this weekend -  the recently released Z-O-M-B-I-E-S 2 which introduces werewolves! P. S. Fanfic writers, please ship the adorbs Zed Necrodopolis (Milo Manheim) and Bucky (Trevor Tordjman) kthxbye. 

Grade: A-minus 

The Old Guard (Gina Prince-Bythewood, 2020)

I never would have heard of this actioner if it weren't for dozens of Tumblr posts gushing over the romance between Joe (Marwan Kenzari) and Nicky (Luca Marinelli), two of the titular Guard. If anything was going to get me to watch another high-body-count movie so soon after the John Wick series, it's two tough guys in love with one another. Turns out it has way more to recommend it. Instead of focusing on one indestructible hero, The Old Guard concerns a posse of immortal (or are they...?) killing machines, some centuries old, tasked with various peacekeeping missions throughout history. It'd be refreshing if they were rabid auteurists, conquering film/disc/bibliographies instead of slaughtering faceless bad guys. But the group evince genuine affection for one another, a rare quality in this genre. And there's a story point (no spoilers) that rivals A.I.: Artificial Intelligence in its intimations of a cruel eternity. Color me impressed.

 Grade: B+

 

A Dirty Shame (John Waters, 2004)

John Waters is one of the chief Oedipal fathers I have to kill. And with A Dirty Shame, he's finally given me guilt-free motivation. You'd think such a voracious reader as Waters would have come across the first volume of The History of Sexuality to discover Foucault's theory of the "implantation of perversions," the notion that the obsessive cataloging of sexualities consolidates power over them. With his storytelling abilities at the lowest they'd been since Mondo Trasho 35 years prior, Waters transforms A Dirty Shame into a perversion implantation machine as he notes every kink and taboo exhibited by Sylvia Stickles' (Tracey Ullman) Baltimore neighbors. And this is no abstract threat. The implantation of perversions encompasses practices ranging from moral censure to punishment and death. You can certainly glean the former from the director's commentary in which Waters confesses that infantilism goes too far for him. And the gleeful cataloging doesn't even ensure the vanguard spirit that made Waters famous. How is it possible that our Filth Elder has never heard of feltching?  It all makes for an oppressive, profoundly conservative film. Even worse, it forces you to reassess the liberating power of his previous work, most immediately the Cavalcade of Perversions from Multiple Maniacs (1970).

Grade: D

She Dies Tomorrow (Amy Seimetz, 2020)

Not quite sure what to do with this one. A woman believes she will die tomorrow and passes this thought to everyone around her like a virus. With uncanny prescience, Seimetz evokes the terror twilight of our empire and privileges mood over story with an array of time-tested art-film techniques - jumbled chronology, clipped narratives, abrupt character introductions, etc. I greeted these difficulties with pleasure. But somehow, I felt that story was putting up a fight with mood, that all the arty devices were still tied conventionally to narrative. Even more perplexing is the fact that I cannot quite prove this nor can I explain why this is detrimental in any way (apart for my general disdain for contemporary narratives). Perhaps my unsettled state as the final credits rolled is proof of She Dies Tomorrow's ultimate success. Nevertheless, the film I cannot help thinking of now is Raging Bull, of all things - a modernist exercise I don't know what to do with apart from mildly appreciating its modernist hijinks. All of which means this merits a second viewing. Until then...

Grade: B+

 

Paula (Rudolph Maté, 1952)

SPOILERS!

 

Having never seen a Rudolph Maté film, I expected competence at best from Paula. But the film astonished me largely because I view it as an avant la lettre rejoinder to a genre I despise - the slasher flick. I don't want to reveal too much in order to preserve the surprise of its many twists. But I have to be specific about the one twist to explain my contention above. So SPOILERS AHEAD!

 

Loretta Young plays Paula, an upper-middle-class woman who hits an orphaned boy, David (Tommy Rettig), with her car. Consumed with guilt, she volunteers at the hospital where David is being treated and discovers he has lost the ability to speak. She takes him into her home and becomes his full-time speech therapist. The therapy goes well and David is warming up to his new life. But one evening, he becomes aware of Paula's involvement in the car accident and this is where the film gets astonishing. Paula fears that the discovery will derail his progress. So she taunts the boy into using his speech to get her arrested. In short, she becomes the anti-Jason/Freddie. Imagine that - a film where someone helps another person rather than leaving acres of dead bodies in their wake. I was so floored that I wanted to give Paula an A+ in the immediate aftermath of seeing it. But to hedge my bets...

Grade: A

The John Wick series...so far (ugh)

I watched them all because projectile vomiting would have occurred had anyone told me that the second and third installments were soooo much better. And right, Chapter 2 is the best of the series. It had to be better than the first, so shoddy that I started strawmanning about my preference for hardcore pornography.  Hollywood is supposed to offer tense narratives over porn's thin pretexts and dull action. But the storytelling in what is now retroactively known as John Wick: Chapter 1 is so inept that I had to check Wikipedia to see if John Wick actually killed Viggo, the main villain, at the end. And why bother fleshing out Wick's precise relationship with The Syndicate of The Council of Twelve or The High Table or whatever when a sequel can pick up the narrative slack? I did love, however, when right before the climax Viggo's perpetually beleaguered henchman sees Wick in the rear view mirror and says, "Goddamn, I knew he'd come!" Hey, me too!

But the excruciating boredom I experienced when watching these films got me thinking about Ara Osterweil's perceptive quote about the relation between porn and the avant-garde: "Whereas the boredom of pornography seems to derive from its uninterrupted and sustained fullness, the ennui of the avant-garde is often generated by the lack (or perceived absence) of narrative event or conventional character development" (453).* So it comes down to which fullnesses we allow ourselves to experience. The John Wick series is full: endless fights (or "choreography"), shopping sprees for weapons, sound effects amplified such that a door closing sounds like a dumpster dropped from a skyscraper, etc. But its fullness services two venal tendencies in American thought: a conspiracy-cured belief in totalities like The High Table and toxic individuality. The moral: There is a Council of Twelve that controls everything with intricate, narrative-drenched codes of conduct that must be adhered to but you, individual, can break those codes. And trust you'll get a sequel that "justifies" your transgression. 

That these ideologies have led to Trumpism makes the John Wick series important on sociological grounds. But it's definitely not my idea of a fun Saturday night, especially since the body count in these films already rivals the Friday the 13th series (proposed law: every murder in a Hollywood film must be accompanied by a one-minute history on the person murdered). And John Wick is only marginally more compelling than Jason Voorhees. His motivation growing ever more cloudy the further the series moves away from his dead wife and dog, he remains a self-serious dullard throughout. The only thing I could possibly want from His Taciturnity is a one-night stand. And therein lies my preference for hardcore pornography. 

As far as the folly of treating these films as individual units, I like Chapter 3 the least because the fights take up an appalling amount of screen time, generating a lack of narrative event suitable for cat napping. And it ends on an even more egregious cliffhanger than Chapter 2 which means this is a television series that will be with us for as long as Keanu Reeves' bones hold up. Nevertheless, I loved Administration, "an organization that stores killer files, processes orders and distributes them," according to the John Wick Fandom page. Staffed mostly by women who resemble 1940s gangster molls updated with copious tats and piercings, Administration is where the series finally becomes ridiculous. This is the excess space where the totality is made flesh. Crucially, it's not mentioned in any of the plot synopses on Wikipedia. As such, it's both narrative-drenched and non-narrative. I like to think the women find all the machinations of the High Table preposterous and are just waiting for their weekly check. And I dream of Lily Tomlin's Ernestine taking over management and pronouncing John Wick "ExcommuniKondo."

John Wick (Chad Stahelski [who?], 2014) - C

John Wick: Chapter 2 (Chad Stahelski [him again?], 2017) - B

John Wick: Chapter 3 - Parabellum (Chad Stahelski [hmm], 2019) - C-minus

John Wick: Chapter 4 - Parallelogram (Chad Stahelski, 2022)  

John Wick: Chapter 5 - Paramecium (Chad Stahelski, 2025) 

John Wick: Chapter 6 - Perineum (Chad Stahelski, 2030) - I predict this will be the best.

*Osterweil, Ara. 2004. “Andy Warhol’s Blow Job: Toward the Recognition of a Pornographic Avant-garde.” In Porn Studies, edited by Linda Williams, 431–360. Durham and London: Duke University Press.